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In playwright Rajiv Joseph’s envisioning, the trio of Bosnian Serbs who helped spark World War I don’t exactly seem like they could shape history. Nedeljko (Adam Shonkwiler) likes to brag about how “a nun bought me a sandwich once,” and that it was “still hot.” Gavrilo (Stephen Stocking) fights by biting his opponents’ fingers. “I’m small!” he says. “I gotta bite!”

Yet these hapless youths are the only ones who show up to a mysterious call to meet “a guy,” Trifko (Jeremy Kahn), in Joseph’s “Archduke,” now in a TheatreWorks production, after having been developed in the company’s New Works Festival in 2016.

It’s 1914 in Sarajevo, and Apis (Scott Coopwood), also known as “The Captain,” marshals the language of a cult leader in finding new recruits to his mission against Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In his logic, “how is history generated?” leads to “the Slavic states become the cesspool of someone else’s sickness.”

Giovanna Sardelli directs the comic drama about stumbling into a historical inflection point.